Women make up almost 20 percent of the current Congress, according to the Center for American
Women and Politics, but they don’t come anywhere near that proportion of Congress’ scandals.

Will it take breaking news of a female lawmaker doing something truly stupid like former Rep.
Anthony Weiner’s tweeting self-portraits of his private parts to strangers to know we are beginning
to achieve gender equality?

This thought comes to mind with news of a new study by political science researchers at Rice
University titled “‘Fairer Sex’ or Purity Myth? Corruption, Gender and Institutional Context.”

Its analysis of data from countries around the world finds the gender gap in corruption to be an
international phenomenon, interestingly in democratic countries more than in dictatorships and
other autocracies.

In democratic countries with generally low levels of corruption, write Rice University’s Justin
Esarey and Gina Chirillo, the study’s authors, women are less likely to be corrupt and less likely
to tolerate corruption than their male counterparts.

Recruiting more women into politics in deeply corrupt countries probably would not decrease
corruption, Esarey told
Science Daily; but in less-corrupt countries, such recruitment might work wonders in
keeping sticky fingers out of the public till.

Why? Hanna Rosin, author of
The End of Men and the Rise of Women, recently compared the pressures on women in high
positions to those of Jackie Robinson, the first black player to break Major League Baseball’s
color line. Warned by his team’s owner to set a good example, he wasn’t about to gamble on any
behavior that wasn’t worth it.

Small wonder, then, that during October’s budget stalemate and government shutdown, Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, suggested that the whole mess might
go away if the guys sat back and let women settle it.

“If we put all the women, Republican and Democrat, in the House together,” the Florida
congresswoman told MSNBC’s
Morning Joe, “the consensus from all of us is that we would get this done in a few
hours."

When fellow guest Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican, jokingly asked whether the group might
include Sarah Palin, Wasserman Schultz did not waver.

“I would argue that even if Sarah Palin were in the room, … we could find a way to get to yes,”
she replied, “because that’s usually women’s goal.”

That’s not an outlandish thought, considering the best-sellers as varied as Deborah Tannen’s
You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation and John Gray’s
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that have been written about such gender
differences. Men want to get the last word, experts say; women want to get a mutual agreement.

Yet I don’t want to over-generalize. The very notion that women are geared toward reason,
compromise and agreement can be the kiss of death in today’s Washington.

“Gender isn’t an absolute predictor of political behavior,” cautioned Rebecca Sive, a Chicago
public-affairs strategist and author of
Every Day Is Election Day: A Woman’s Guide to Winning Any Office, from the PTA to the White
House.

“Women win office the same way men do,” she told me in an email exchange. “They get more votes
than the other guy. Once there, they bring a different perspective to the decision-making
table."

As examples, Sive mentioned the Paycheck Fairness Act that Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., introduced this year and the effort of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.,
to improve sexual-assault prosecutions in the military.

Republican women are stepping up, too. After House Republicans forced a partial government
shutdown in a failed attempt to repeal President Barack Obama’s health-care plan, Sen. Kelly
Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican, significantly broke ranks to suggest a practical compromise: a “
pause” in Obamacare’s implementation so a bipartisan group could try to fix its problems.

Nice tries like that may help explain why women have been falling behind the guys in corruption
scandals. They’re too busy trying to get things done.